San Joaquin Delta College will owe an estimated $122 million to cover the cost of promised lifetime retiree health benefits - a sum greater than the college's entire budget in any given year.

The question, then, is how to eat that elephant without siphoning too much money away from already diminished educational programs.

Trustees earlier this week heard a plan to address the problem by ramping up the amount of money the college sets aside each year in its retiree fund. Under the plan, by 2025 the annual cost of providing the benefits would plateau before eventually declining.

"I think this is a very sound strategy as a way to attack this thing," said Michael Hill, a financial consultant for Delta. "It's not beyond your reach as a district if you have the will and desire to do it."

Delta isn't alone in shouldering this burden. Many public employers granted lifetime employee health benefits in the 1970s and 80s, failing to understand how much that would cost and devising no plan to pay for it, Hill told trustees. Stockton's retiree health plan was a factor in the city's recent spiral toward bankruptcy.

Delta eliminated retiree health benefits for new hires in 2007, but it will be many years before the promises it made before 2007 will be fully kept.

Only now is the college considering some kind of long-term plan.

One idea heard on Tuesday night is to increase the amount of money dedicated to paying the benefits by $250,000 next year and about $150,000 each year after that.

Annual retiree costs would rise from about $4 million this year to just over $7 million in 2025 and would stay flat another two decades instead of soaring even higher, Hill said.

Such a plan would allow college officials to deal with the debt sooner rather than later, making sure that not all of the costs are simply passed on to future employees who don't benefit from the health benefits previously granted.

And, the mere act of putting a plan in place could help satisfy accreditation officials, who have said they'll be looking at liability issues in the future during that important peer-review process, Trustee Teresa Brown said.

Trustees could be asked in the coming months to approve a specific plan that would kick in starting in the fall.

Trustee Steve Castellanos cautioned there would be a "trade-off" as the money dedicated to paying off the college's liability will have to come from somewhere.

"To me it seems there's a lot of pressure in the community and on campus to restore programs, to put classes back in," he said. "Every additional dollar we put into this is a dollar that's not going to put into program restoration, I would imagine."